Aporagender

Why aporagender replaced an earlier word

The moderator of a Tumblr blog called Aporagender coined the word in 2014 as an alternative to aliagender, out of a concern that aliagender might be racist or appropriative. The coiner is anonymous in every source on file. Neither wiki elaborates on the concern, and neither names the person; the LGBTQIA+ Wiki still lists aliagender beside maverique as a related identity, so the older word was not withdrawn.

The blog was the primary record and almost none of it survives at first hand. Seven of the references on the Nonbinary Wiki's page point at posts on that blog and every one is marked dead, archived in July 2023; two more survive only as archive copies made in 2016. Both of those two carry the date 14 June 2014, which places the coinage in the same weeks as Maverique. One is an answer to a reader asking whether agender sits under the umbrella, and the other is somebody else recording having just come across a new gender coined by a stranger. The dead posts include the coiner's own announcement that the word had recently been coined by them. A record made of asks and reblogs on a single blog is the ordinary shape of a 2014 coinage, and it is also the reason the dating cannot be tightened.

The reference works that picked the word up repeat the year without adding to it. Dictionary.com, covering the term in an article on gender words, says only that it is thought to have been coined in 2014 by a Tumblr user, and glosses the Greek prefix as away off, apart, or separate. GenderGender's reference page puts the coinage vaguely in the 2010s and in online non-binary communities, which is less precise than the wikis it presumably drew on.

What aporagender says it is not

Three contrasts do most of the defining. Against androgyny, which can mean a mixture of female and male or a position between them, aporagender is neither. Against Agender, which is the absence of an inner sense of gender, aporagender requires one, and the sources are firm that a person needs a feeling of having a gender and that the gender is completely and totally not male or female. Against Neutrois the answer depends on which sense of neutrois is meant: where neutrois means genderless the two are not synonyms, and where it means a present neutral gender, neutrois can sit under aporagender. The Nonbinary Wiki adds that aporagender is still needed because not everyone uses neutrois the same way, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki names neugender and neutral comgender as the readings under which the two words meet.

Dictionary.com draws the same line and draws it harder, saying that what separates aporagender people from neutrois people is that they have a gender identity at all. It also groups aporagender with Xenogender as identities reaching for something outside the binary, where GenderGender's page separates the two, on the ground that a xenogender describes gender through an outside framework while an aporagender simply is not built from the binary.

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki adds a relation the other sources leave out. Every aporagender is by definition Abinary, unaligned with maleness or femaleness, and aporagenders are commonly, though not necessarily, atrinary as well. The same page gives the gender quality attached to the word as aporinity.

How aporagender works as an umbrella

The term is used both as a single gender and as a cover for several. Used as a cover it takes in some non-binary and genderqueer people but excludes anyone who is agender, between male and female, or binary trans, which makes it narrower than Genderqueer in the same role: genderqueer as an umbrella takes in non-binary people generally, agender people included, and people whose gender is related to manhood or womanhood. The Nonbinary Wiki summarises the aporagender sense as pretty much everything that is not male, female, agender, or between male and female. Healthline's glossary carries both readings in one line, calling it an umbrella term and a non-binary gender identity at once. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki gives maverique as its best-known example.

One qualification sits at the end of the Nonbinary Wiki's account and complicates the umbrella. Some aporagender people, it says, find every gender fits equally well, so that none of them and all of them apply, and they still place themselves under the non-binary umbrella. That is a different position from a gender separate from all the others, and the page records both without reconciling them.

Why the aporagender flag was redrawn

Because the first design was read as making the opposite argument to the word. Hyaenahart drew the original on the Aporagender blog, and its colours are laid out as a diagram: blue and pink at either end for the two genders this one is away from, purple for the feeling of being between them, and yellow at the centre for a gender that is nothing like female, male or both, placed near enough the others to show it is still a gender. In 2018 Mod Lune of the Tumblr blog wedontcareaboutyourbinary objected that this leaned too heavily on binary between-ness and sat too close to the bigender flag, and offered a replacement drawn from a different starting point. It was proposed as an alternative, for people who preferred it.

The last row is the odd one. It describes five horizontal stripes that neither community wiki records, attached to meanings that include agender and absence, which the definition on the same page rules out of the identity. Glossary pages are what a search returns first.

Symbols followed the flags and are dated more precisely than anything else about the word. The Tumblr user z1msoda made one on 4 August 2021, and mourningmogaicrew made an alternative on 13 August 2021.

Where the aporagender record runs out

Quickly. Two community wikis, a dictionary site's glossary article, a health site's list of gender terms, a shop's reference page, and a frequency of 0.1 per cent on the Nonbinary Wiki against which no survey is named. No academic literature covers the word and no dictionary of record carries it. Wiktionary has no entry for it, and no survey on file reports a write-in count.

What the record does hold is unusually specific for a microlabel: a month for the coinage, a reason for it, two named flag designers with dated posts, two named symbol makers, and a stated disagreement about what the first flag implied.